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Last week while discussing Ridley Scott's ham-fisted commentary on the Iraq War in Kingdom of Heaven, @ABigGuy4U mentioned that one of his favorite things about historical epics was how they acted as double period pieces, saying as much about the period they were made in as the period they depict.
That got me thinking, what are some of your favorite unintentional time capsule movies that are more interesting about what they tell us about the time they were made than the time they depict?
This is a sort of pet interest of mine. I remember reading a book on the French revolution where the preface had a similar sort of comment: that every history of the French Revolution was really itself more a commentary on contemporary politics. It's an interesting way to go about looking at past media.
One I watched earlier in the year was Minority Report. For those unaware, it's a Spielberg film from 2002 starring Tom Cruise. In the near future bla bla bla, Washington DC comes up with a way to see murders before they happen, and arrest the perpetrators before they kill anyone. The suspects get sort of put into a coma and incarcerated forever. Then of course Tom Cruise gets framed for a murder he hasn't yet committed, and etc etc the program gets shut down.
This is of course was obviously pointed at US criminal justice, and particularly the debate over the death penalty which was a popular cause célèbre at that point. The problem is the film sets up the moral dilemmas very poorly. For one it turns out the "precogs" (who see the future) are never wrong; the film teases you with the notion that they're regularly making mistakes and imprisoning innocent people frequently but it turns out that the grand sum of their errors was literally just two times where the head of the program tricked them. The film tries to play around with this question of "fate"; can you really punish a man for a crime he hasn't committed yet? But because the program has been so successful at extirpating premeditated homicides most of the time they're stopping people who are literally in the act of killing someone in a crime of passion (in the opening sequence, they grab a guy just as he is swinging down to stab his wife for adultery).
So they try to make it out like this whole program is some clear moral wrong when they've actually succeeded in pretty much eliminating murder, and entirely without false positives. It's some real turn of the millennium optimism that the problem with the American justice system is that it is too effective at stopping crime. Easy to imagine this film being much different if it was adapted again today.
Minority Report is one of the best sci-fi movies ever made in the Hollywood mainstream. Atmospheric, gorgeous to look at, intelligent, thought-provoking, emotionally resonant. Spielberg was firing on all cylinders with that one.
Philip K. Dick is famous for writing insane stories that are almost completely rewritten into screenplays for great movies: Total Recall, Bladerunner, Minority Report. I haven't watched The Adjustment Bureau and The Man in the High Castle myself, but I've heard they match the pattern.
A Scanner Darkly, on the contrary, was a faithful adaptation and it was boring despite featuring a great ensemble cast.
Interesting to see this and the comment by @FtttG disliking A Scanner Darkly. I don't watch much any more so the odds of me rewatching it (or anything) are low, but I remember it had some incisive commentary about drugs and policing. Perhaps that was boring, though.
And by incisive commentary, I mean as someone who works in the criminal justice system, I found all-too-accurate the film's overall depiction of addicts (including them burning away everything about their personality until they're a hollow shell run by drugs), the drug scene, policing (including undercover work and how it all becomes intertwined with/dependent upon the drug scene), and the parasitic "treatment" industry that has attached itself to the legal system.
All of this was in the novel as well, it's just that the movie was... less than the sum of its parts. It had a great story (it's probably the most personal of Dick's works), a stellar cast, it cleverly used CGI, but it just didn't click together.
In contrast, No Country for Old Men (which I also read as a novel first and watched the adaptation later) is a great movie, despite being a similarly generally faithful adaptation.
Well put! I have a real soft spot for the movie, which is to say that I think it was quite well done while I also agree that it doesn't really hang together on the whole. In isolation, I love the actors involved and their performances, I love Linklater's vision, I think the animation brings an incredible level of surrealism to the movie, the script hews closely to the book in the best possible way... and yet. It's hard to connect to Bob/"Fred" as a protagonist. The drug fueled ranting and general chaos and insanity is a little too on the nose; it quickly becomes grating. And as good as the climax is, the resolution just feels superficial to me.
Maybe the script could have been better. Maybe the performances could have been tweaked just enough to make the difference. Probably the animation in particular hurt more than it helped, particularly with the emotional beats. Perhaps a different treatment would have done the trick. Regardless, I don't feel the need or desire to see it again.
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